There's good stuff on Substack, but there's a lot of slop here and I hear plenty of complaints from other people that echo this.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When all you understand about ideas is that they are information, and that they spread, then everything looks like a distribution problem, or perhaps a few steps later you decide it's a monetization problem.

But we don't have a shortage of distribution channels, nor is it impractical to make money as a creator. It may not be trivial, but well-paid content creators are rather abundant.

No matter how good your tools, if you apply them enough you will eventually be left with only the problems that they are least suited to solve. Distribution is solved. Monetization is solved. Perhaps there are some political disputes over who can speak where, but there always have been. Whatever the next step is, it will be in a different direction, not simply blindly cargo culting what has worked up until now.

If “nothing ever happens”, if our ideas are stuck and turning to slop, then building the next Twitter or Substack alone will not fix anything. If we need to move forward, we need a deeper understanding of where ideas come from, a diagnosis of what is wrong today, and a solution to that specific problem rather than something unrelated, like mere scale.

We are in the post scarcity age of information, we have information abundance. That's a very different thing from wisdom abundance.